"The Qt development toolkit is undergoing a major overhaul. The developers behind the project announced the availability of the Qt 5 alpha release this week. It's a key milestone on the path to the official launch of Qt 5, expected to occur later this year." The kind of stuff to read Ars for.

That must be why for about a year it wouldn't start up at all on my computer, simply redirecting me to a software-rendered fallback mode. Then open-source drivers finally got around supporting my hardware sufficiently well for Gnome Shell to work.

I do not blame driver manufacturers, don't get me wrong, reverse-engineering proprietary drivers (that won't even work on my machine) must be an awful lot of work. I do, however, blame Gnome Shell for relying on stuff that is only there late in the life cycle of a piece of hardware.

If you have the strong arm of Microsoft or the limited hardware range of Apple, you can work out the quirks of modern GPUs. But desktop linux does not have this luxury. Even Microsoft had some serious trouble when they updated their GPU driver model in the Vista days.